The Cyberkink Sideshow by Ophidia Cox Page B

moved her hand down between his wide thighs, feeling under his balls where the Lycra squeezed them, and up to examine the shape of his piercing. The wide metal barb pushed against the folds of his groin, almost as though it acted as an anchor to stop the tip of his cock from disappearing into his flesh when he wasn’t using it.
    A loudspeaker crackled and shrieked from the arena.  
    “The evening’s event’s getting underway,” said Victor. “We ought to get over there, or we’ll be left with the bad seats.”
    Sylvia hesitated as she untied him. “Victor...” Did she really have the courage to ask this? “Would it be all right for someone...a member of the public to do something in one of your acts? Not like how you do it!” she hurriedly added. “Maybe something like the hermaphrodites do? It’s okay if I call them hermaphrodites, isn’t it? The people who were in the ring with you on the opening night?”
    Victor examined his wrist and waved his hand dismissively. “They’re both transsexuals who got halfway and decided they liked the view from there.”
    Sylvia laughed.
    “They won’t mind if you call them that.” Victor leaned his weight back onto his heels and frowned, stretching his arms and rubbing his wrists as he considered. “Come tomorrow. I’ll have a word with some of the other performers about fitting you into one of our acts.”
    He took a seat at the back row and Sylvia sat beside him. This night’s events seemed to be less organized than the previous ones. Various acts would be set up, but this time, members of the audience could come up to participate. Down in the arena, gallows had been constructed, and five people lined up under them. They stood on stools, and Vaughn fastened a noose around the neck of each.
    Sylvia stiffened. “What are they doing? Isn’t that dangerous?”
    Vaughn pushed the first man off his stool. He dangled from the rope, his hands clawing at his neck.
    “Strangulation fetish. Oh, don’t worry, it’s not dangerous. Vaughn is a pro, and we have trained medics on hand in the unlikely event of anything actually going wrong.”
    Sylvia followed his gaze to one side, where a man and a woman in sexualized nurse costumes stood.
    After a few seconds, Vaughn picked up the man’s feet and stood him back on the chair. He took hold of the scruff of his neck and disentangled the rope from his neck. The man stood there gasping for a bit, then he bowed and the crowd applauded, and he stepped away from the gallows.
    This didn’t seem right, but Sylvia couldn’t pin down the feeling that told her it was wrong. Perhaps because it was an execution fetish. Perhaps it was because if a mistake did happen, the consequences would be dire. But the whole point was that a mistake wasn’t going to happen, because it was a controlled situation.
    “What’s more dangerous,” said Victor in a quieter, more contemplative voice, “is when people have such paraphilias but they are embarrassed of them, and so they attempt to practice them in isolation with inappropriate equipment. Take urethral play as an example. I enjoy it, but the mainstream thinks it’s disgusting and it goes against nature. Do you have any idea how many men end up in hospital with pencils and knitting needles and other such material lodged in their bladders, or infections resulting from such unsafe practices?”
    Sylvia thought back to the metal rods in Vaughn’s torture shop. “I wouldn’t know.” Although it was an interesting idea and something she’d never thought about. She almost said something about only seeing the ones that she brought in stone drunk and with suspected alcohol poisoning, or the ones who’d got involved in violent crime and had it backfire on them, and the people who tried to hide packets of drugs in imaginative places. She suddenly remembered that Victor was not her colleague or her friend or anything of the sort, and that she’d come here to get information that she hadn’t